


Lavender Town

by ive_been_losing_sleep



Series: Hinata Rare Pair Week [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Anxiety, Established Relationship, M/M, Pokemon - Freeform, also hinata names his pokemon after his teammates cuz he's a dork, and everybody's favorite creepy town from gen 1, esp to shiny hunting, just boyfriends being cuddly, lots of pokemon references, not really in too much detail but touched upon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-18 12:57:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7316053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ive_been_losing_sleep/pseuds/ive_been_losing_sleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Maybe I should play too."</p><p>"You want to play Pokemon."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lavender Town

**Author's Note:**

> yay i'm participating in a week!!! This is for Hinata Shouyou Rare Pair Week, and I'll hopefully have some fics up for the rest of the week as well!
> 
> For today, I chose the prompt: Lavender
> 
> Admittedly, it's very loosely based on the prompt but oh well
> 
> //
> 
> Day One  
> Prompt: Lavender

“Kenma!” a voice chirps through his phone, and Kenma’s restless nerves pause in their jumping for just a moment. “You’re awake early.”

Kenma nods jerkily, too busy hurriedly cramming papers into his bag to acknowledge the fact that Shouyou wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. “Work,” he answers, the words fighting to escape from his tight throat. “There’s a presentation.”

“You’re presenting?” Kenma nods again, and Shouyou thankfully knows him well enough to take the silence he hears as a confirmation. “Is it important?”

“Yes.” Because it is. It’s really important, and he’s just an intern right now, but it’s an opportunity to show that he knows what he’s talking about, he knows what kind of things appeal to audiences and what to incorporate in games to lure more people in, he knows these things, he does, but presentations have never been a strong point, and if this goes badly he’ll-

“Have you left the house yet?” Shouyou asks, coaxing Kenma away from his thoughts gently. The phone is shivering in his hand, and his fingers tap sporadically against the case, the anxious rhythm carving itself into the quiet apartment. 

He glances at the shoes by the front door. “No.”

“Are you running late?”

“I’m not _you_ , Shouyou.”

“Well, that was rude,” Shouyou huffs. “And to think I was going to tell you about how I left that tea you liked in the very back of your cabinet.”

“You did?” Kenma asks, peering into the kitchen dubiously. The rhythm halts for a moment, and he takes the chance to breathe deeply.

“Behind the hot chocolate,” Shouyou confirms, sounding proud for finding a good enough hiding place that Kenma hasn’t found the tea in the two months it’s been there. “There’s not a lot of it, so I thought I would save it for when you need it.”

Kenma digs around in the pantry, finally pulling away with a light blue cardboard box in his hand. It’s small, probably holding no more than five tea bags, and decorated with softly colored flowers and trees. The words ‘Soothing’ and ‘Anxiety Relief’ are typed in a bottom corner. 

He fills a travel mug with water and sets it down inside the microwave to heat up, listening to Shouyou’s steady breathing across the line mixing with the heavy tapping of his heel against the kitchen tile.

He drops the tea bag into the mug with a satisfying plop and watches as a warm orange color seeps throughout the water. He’s silent for a few, long moments, waiting for the tea to finish steeping as his thumbs rub impatient circles across the plastic mug. 

Something jostles loudly in his ear, and Kenma flinches away, nearly spilling the tea in his hands. But it’s just Shouyou, fidgeting as the silence between them stretches out. 

Quietly, Kenma hums. It’s short, lilting upward at the end as he screws the lid onto his mug. It’s meant to sound appreciative, thanking Shouyou when he can’t get the right words out. 

Thankfully, Shouyou understands. 

“I knew that would help!” he cheers happily. “You were probably up all night worrying about this presentation, and you’re probably worrying now, too, but you shouldn’t! You’re gonna-” 

A car horn blares from somewhere near him, and he yelps in surprise. “Sorry, sorry!” Shouyou shouts, muffled enough for Kenma to know that it’s not aimed at him. 

“You’re on your morning jog?” Kenma guesses, closing the door of his apartment behind him and fitting the key into the lock. He takes a sip of his tea, warm and citrusy, and feels the heat of it fall past his chest and pool in his stomach. 

“Yeah,” Shouyou huffs. “Usually no one’s out at this hour, so I kind of forget to look when I’m crossing the street sometimes. Guess that lady didn’t appreciate me jumping out in front of her so suddenly.” 

Kenma stops on the stairway, hand tightening around his phone. “Shouyou. _Please_ don’t get hit by a car.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he placates quickly. “Look, look, I’ll look both ways right now okay?” There’s a long exaggerated pause, and Kenma finds himself smiling into his tea. “All clear! Across the street I go.”

His fingers relax and he continues down the stairs. His satchel bounces against his thigh, and he tries to time his steps so the slap of leather against the denim of his jeans follows a steady beat. 

“Is there a reason you called?” Shouyou asks, and Kenma is forced to focus on the feeling of his bag against his leg. “You normally don’t like to talk on the phone, not when you can text.”

Kenma can’t argue that Shouyou’s words aren’t true. He typically hates phone calls, unable to read people’s body language without them standing in front of him and too often leaving him at a loss for appropriate responses. With text messages, at least he has the advantage of time to formulate his sentences, the ability to mull over the best way to answer over the span of several minutes without it being unreasonable. But phone conversations leave him at a loss, and he tends to avoid them at all costs. 

But that isn’t the case with Shouyou. That _was_ never the case with Shouyou. Not when Shouyou never hides his emotions, not when he never uses his voice to disguise any discontent, not when Kenma can always clearly hear his happiness radiating through his words. 

So Shouyou is always the one that Kenma turns to when he needs to _hear_ somebody. He’s always the first number he calls, even if it’s rarely, and his voice is the one that always manages to settle him. 

Kenma wants to tell him this. Wants to tell him that Shouyou’s the one he calls when his anxiety gets the better of him and threatens to ruin him from the inside, when he fears that he might do something stupid, when he needs to have someone talking in his ear so that it’s an impossibility that he’ll do something he’ll regret. 

But the words never make it past his lips. 

“What time are you coming in today?” He says instead. 

He’s started to count the times the satchel hits his leg. 

Shouyou laughs. “You could’ve asked me that over text,” he says, but doesn’t press any further. “My last class today gets out at two, so I’ll be at the station a little past five, alright?” 

Kenma nods again. “Okay.”

Shouyou hums happily. “You’re gonna do great,” he assures him. “And you’ll get to tell me all about how it went once I get there, ‘kay?” A small smile starts to slip onto Kenma’s lips. “You just gotta make sure you speak up a little bit, babe. So that they can hear it clearly when you tell them everything they can be doing better.”

“Okay.”

“You feeling okay?” The question is soft, quiet in its understanding. 

“Better now,” Kenma tells him honestly. He’s already stopped counting the times his satchel hits his leg, and his knuckles are no longer white around his mug. 

“You have your DS with you?”

“Of course.” Still, he pats the front pocket of his satchel to make sure, even though he has already checked three times that morning. 

“Pokemon? Are you still hunting for that shiny Snivy?”

“Thirty-seven-hundred soft resets.”

“You’ll get it soon!” Shouyou tells him confidently. “Then you’re all set, Kenma. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

That doesn’t mean he won’t worry anyway. 

“And if you do, then you have that shiny hunt to keep you company. I know it helps you relax a bit.” Shouyou’s voice falls, quieter and gentler. “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you in a few hours, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Love you.”

“I love you too.”

 

Hours later, with his heart pounding and hands shaking, he curls up in a folding chair in the empty staff room. Clutching his DS in his hands, he lets himself focus on the simple finger motions of his soft-resets, lets the repetitive motions lull his nerves to rest. The smile in his boss’s face after his presentation remains imprinted in the back of his mind, and he lets it dwell there as he watches the screen for a Snivy just a few shades darker normal. 

 

“So how’d it go?” Shouyou asks as soon as they meet at the train station, leaning to the left just enough that there shoulders would brush together. 

Kenma knows that what he really wants is to hold his hand. Barely-there-touches are far from Shouyou’s style, but he never asks Kenma for more than he’s comfortable to give. 

And when they’re in public like this, shoving their way through the thick crowds of Tokyo, Kenma’s never comfortable with anything.

“He smiled at the end,” he offers quietly, and Shouyou cheers, throwing his arms out happily and almost knocking the hat from the head of a man bustling past them. 

“That’s great! That means it went well! Did he say anything?”

“Not really,” Kenma says, pausing when an old lady pushes herself between him and Shouyou as she rushes by. “He just thanked me for my presentation and called up the next person.”

“But he looked happy?” Hinata confirms and grins when Kenma nods. “See? I told you you’d do great.”

Kenma smiles, but his fingers tug on his coat sleeve anxiously. 

Expectedly, Shouyou’s eyes follow the movement. “And after?”

Kenma glances away, quiet as they pass a group of laughing teenagers. 

Shouyou nods, not letting the grin on his face slip away entirely. “Did you get the Snivy then?”

“Thirty-nine-hundred.”

“Augh,” Shouyou groans, tilting his head back. “Soon, it has to be coming soon.”

“Shouyou, I’m not even at half odds yet.”

Shouyou turns to him, deadly serious. “ _Soon_.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Good.” Shouyou nods to himself, satisfied, then quickens his pace so he can walk in front of Kenma, whirling around to face him as he walks backwards. 

Kenma has to mutter embarrassed apologies to the group of people Shouyou’d almost tripped by doing so.

“Let’s go get some food,” Shouyou pleads, and Kenma grimaces a little, feeling the people crowd around them as they continue into the busier parts of town. 

After seeing the look on his face Shouyou spins back around so they walk shoulder to shoulder again. “Isn’t there a place around here that does deliveries?” he asks. “I think we had it last time we came, and the food tasted pretty good. We can go home and order something.”

“Okay.” His response is quiet, so Shouyou smiles softly and brushes their fingers together, brief enough that no one else around sees. 

Then, he pulls a safe distance away before Kenma can feel the anxiety creeping in on him again. 

 

Later that night finds them sitting together in Kenma’s armchair, big enough to comfortably hold two people as small as them, but they squish together anyway. Shouyou’s arm wraps around Kenma’s waist loosely, while the other plays with the strands of hair that had fallen out of his ponytail. Both of Kenma’s legs are sprawled across Shouyou’s lap, warm underneath the quilt draped over them. 

“I kind of miss the blond,” Shouyou murmurs sleepily, tugging on a piece of black hair that had fallen over Kenma’s eyes.

Kenma wrinkles his nose. “I don’t. Too much effort to maintain.”

“But the pudding thing was so cute,” his boyfriend whines, burying his face in Kenma’s neck. 

Kenma presses down the trigger buttons of his DS, watching the screen flare white as it restarts. “Nope. I’m staying brunet now.”

“Fine,” Shouyou says flippantly. “Don’t listen to your wonderful boyfriend who loves you, just ignore his opinion, that’s fine. See if I’ll listen to you next time.” He presses the outline of a teasing smile against Kenma’s neck. 

“I _do_ listen to my wonderful boyfriend’s opinions,” Kenma argues. Then, he turns his face so he can rest his forehead against the side of Shouyou’s head. “Just not when they’re dumb.”

“You’re so mean.”

Kenma just smiles and goes back to his game. 

He can feel Shouyou watching him as he continues his hunt, waiting for him to break the silence that must be choking him, suffocating him. 

“Maybe I should play too.”

Kenma immediately pauses, then whirls around in Shouyou’s hold so he can stare at him. “You want to play Pokemon.”

Shouyou blinks. “It’s important to you, right?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for the answer that he already knows. “And I know that it helps you through your panic attacks, so there must be something great that I’m missing out on here. I want to know what it is.”

“Do you have your DS with you?”

Shouyou nods eagerly, already pulling away from Kenma to fly across the room to where his bag is thrown across the floor. He returns with a black DS covered in an assortment of stickers, ranging from volleyballs to Animal Crossing characters.

“I can just borrow one of your games right? What’s the newest one? Ruby something?”

“Shouyou,” Kenma says, turning to gaze at his boyfriend with serious eyes. “You can’t just _start_ with Omega Ruby.”

“What? Why not?”

“You have to start at the beginning,” he hisses, pulling the DS from Shouyou’s hands. “Here.”

It only takes a few minutes to download Pokemon Blue from the store, but when Kenma looks back up, there’s suddenly a huge grin emblazoned across Shouyou’s face. 

“You’re excited,” Shouyou whispers, staring so adoringly at Kenma that he has to look away. 

Shouyou doesn’t mind though - he never does - and just wraps himself around Kenma once again, watching as he loads up the game and planting soft kisses against the nearest cheek. 

“Here.” Kenma hands him the DS, and Shouyou takes it like it’s something precious, holding it close as the different Pokemon flash across the screen. 

Suddenly, Kenma’s saying, “There’s a town in this game,” and Shouyou looks up at him so quickly that he has to take a moment and collect his thoughts. “Lavender Town. The, uh, the soundtrack for it creeped a lot of people I knew out. They said that it was scary, and there’s even a whole urban legend thing centered around it.” Shouyou blinks at him curiously, and Kenma forces himself to get to the point. “It always reminded me of my anxiety.”

Immediately, Shouyou is muting the volume of the DS. “Ah!” he yelps. “I’ll turn it down then, so it won’t-”

“That’s not what I meant,” Kenma breathes, sliding his fingers over Shouyou’s to turn the sound back up. “I actually liked it. It kind of helped me, I guess.” He pulls his hand away from Shouyou, and it meets with his other so that they both fist tightly in his lap. They don’t stay like that for long though, because Shouyou leans over to grab Kenma’s DS from the coffee table and return it to Kenma’s hands. 

“I started having panic attacks when I was seven,” he starts, and he doesn’t know why he begins there, not when Shouyou already knows that. “And they were confusing and scary and they freaked me out, I never knew what was happening, _no one_ knew what was happening-” Kenma stops, takes a breath, and continues. “So when the song reminded me of the anxiety, it didn’t _make_ me anxious,” he explains. “It helped define the feeling a little better, helped me understand it.” He starts up his own game, tapping at the A button repeatedly to skip the dialogue at the beginning. “I used to just stand in the middle of the town and listen to the music. The track couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes long, but the endless loop never bothered me. Kuroo used to call me crazy, but I think the song just gave him nightmares and he was freaked out.” 

A chuckle vibrates near Kenma’s ear. “I’ll let you know when I get there,” Shouyou tells him. “We can listen to it together.”

Kenma’s chest tightens, and he pushes himself further against Shouyou. “Thank you,” he mumbles. 

“Of course.” Hinata taps to begin his first journey, resting his chin on Kenma’s head after placing a soft kiss there. “Anything for you, babe, my darling, the love of my life.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“You _looooove_ me,” Hinata sings, dropping his chin down to bump against Kenma’s shoulder. 

“No, I don’t.” 

He has to turn his face away so Shouyou wouldn’t see his smile. 

 

Their food comes a little while later, and they both pause their games long enough to drop down on the floor and eat at the coffee table. There’s a movie playing on TV, something action-y with too many explosions and cheesy one-liners for Kenma’s taste, but neither of them pay attention to it anyway. 

After, when Kenma has finally relented to Shouyou’s pleas to be fed by him and having to go change his shirt because he was laughing way too hard to actually swallow and the food had fallen over his clothes, they drag a few pillows onto the floor with them and lay across the carpet. Kenma props himself up on his stomach, holding his DS in front of him, while Shouyou spreads out against his back, his own DS lifted high enough that Kenma just waits for the moment that it drops and clatters across his face. 

“Hey, Kenma.” Shouyou rolls over so he can hold his DS in front of Kenma’s, blocking the screen with his own. “Look, I named my rival after you.”

“That’s nice, Shouyou.” Kenma cranes his neck to see his DS behind Shouyou’s, but doesn’t need to when Shouyou pulls away with a huff. 

“It was a declaration of my love for you!” he exclaims, raising himself up only to drop down against Kenma with an exaggerated _oof_. 

Kenma groans, wiggling to try and fight off the new ache in his back. “You do know that your rival is far from a love interest in this game?”

“Shhhhh,” Shouyou hisses, curling himself around the game protectively. “Don’t deny them of their love, they’re just poor, star-crossed lovers.”

Kenma smiles at his DS. 

“And I really just did it so I can say I demolished you in Pokemon battles.” Shouyou slides off of Kenma’s back, but keeps one leg thrown over both of his. 

“That’s your first mistake. Once you named him after me you made him invincible.”

“That’s not true,” Shouyou says petulantly, wrinkling his nose like an argumentative child. “I’m gonna choose charmander, so I’ll win for sure.”

A few minutes later, Shouyou gets destroyed in his first rival battle, and Kenma laughs. 

 

“Kenma, hey. Kenma.”

Kenma blinks his eyes open blearily, trying to decipher the shapes across the ceiling built into the uneven dry wall. 

He’s never slept well in the first place, his mind running too quickly for it to take a proper break, but it’s easier when Shouyou’s around. His boyfriend has a talent of making him relax, and Kenma usually falls into a gentler sleep with almost no trouble.

Sometimes though, his thoughts still get to him, even when he’s asleep. They’re never really nightmares, and he can never quite remember them once he wakes up, but they’re enough to leave him anxious and out-of-sorts in the morning. 

“Not sleeping well?” Hinata asks, and Kenma wonders if he was turning in his sleep again. Or maybe mumbling. 

The moment Kenma sits up, Hinata’s out of bed, padding into the kitchen and flicking on the light before disappearing from sight. There’s the sound of dishes clinking, cabinets opening, and water running, occurring in quick succession, one after the other, before a long pause. To break it, the microwave lets out a high beep, and Hinata reappears in the doorway with a coffee mug clasped between his hands. 

“Here,” he says, handing the cup off to Kenma’s shaking fingers and settling down beside him. Immediately, Kenma crawls into his lap, careful not to spill tea over them as he curls into Shouyou’s chest. 

Shouyou quietly hums under his breath, rubbing a calming hand between Kenma’s shoulder blades. The tea in Kenma’s hand is too hot, and the flavor is weak from not steeping long enough, but he sips at it anyway, letting himself fall deeper into Shouyou’s chest. 

Leaning around his boyfriend in his arms, Shouyou reaches for his DS. “I’m almost to Lavender Town,” he explains. 

For a few minutes, the silence is only swayed by the robotic music coming from Shouyou’s game, often interrupted by the cries of Pidgey and Rattata. Kenma relaxes into it, sipping quietly on his tea and letting Shouyou’s soft breathing ruffle his hair. 

“Tell me about your presentation.” Kenma pauses, lips pressed against the rim of his mug, and looks up at Shouyou in surprise. He shrugs. “If we’re up we might as well talk, and you never did tell me what your presentation was about.”

Kenma glances back down to his tea. “Diversity in video games,” he mumbles, and he knows Shouyou’s grinning without even needing to look. 

“What about it?” he prompts.

“That companies will actually gain more costumers by straying away from the overdone white male protagonist. That by including characters of more minorities it will draw in a larger audience.”

Hinata hums quietly under his breath in acknowledgment, his focus mostly on the game in his hands. 

“Where are you now?” Kenma whispers, eager to pull the subject away from himself. He twists around so he can check Shouyou’s progress. He’s in the middle of a battle, and Kenma watches in amusement as he repeatedly spams tackle on his Ivysaur, affectionately nicknamed Plantyama. 

“I’m in Vermillion’s gym,” he says as his Ivysaur finally takes down Surge’s Pikachu. He beat me once before, but my Bulbasaur evolved so now I’m gonna win.”

Kenma hums doubtfully, laughing when Hinata playfully shoves him in return. 

It comes down to his last Pokemon, but Pidgeynoya prevails, and Hinata walks out of the gym with a new badge saved into his game. 

“Lavender Town’s next right?” 

“Yeah.”

It takes Shouyou a couple times to get through the route, burdened by fainting Pokemon and an extreme lack of potions, but he gets there eventually. The music starts as soon as he steps off the route, and Kenma is suddenly plunged into the track. The notes wrap around him, strong and comforting, and when Shouyou’s arms reach forward to do the same thing, he’s suddenly so thankful to have someone who understands him like this. 

Shouyou sets the game in front of them, his character just to the side of the PokeMart, and turns the game volume as high as it will go. He takes Kenma’s mug of tea, still half full, and sets on the table next to them. Then, he slowly falls backward, dragging Kenma with him until they’re cuddled up on the floor. 

“Hey, Kenma?”

Kenma doesn’t respond, too busy paying attention to the song to be able to say anything. But he does move his head, burrowing it against the warmth of Shouyou’s chest. 

“I think Kuroo was right,” Shouyou says. “This song is _really_ creepy.”

Kenma whines, even though he knows that his boyfriend is only teasing him. 

“But I like it,” Shouyou decides, nodding his head once so that his chin hits the top of Kenma’s head. “It’s important to you, and it helped you out. So I like it.”

Kenma swallows, then presses his nose against Shouyou’s collarbone. Lavender Town’s music pulls at his tongue gently, and he whispers, “I love you.”

“I know, I know. I love you, too.”

Kenma shakes his head. “I love you so, so much. I don’t know how- how you-”

_How you always know what I need, how you put up with me, how you can love me._

Lavender Town tugs on him again. “Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Shouyou tells him, pushing his hair back behind his ears. “You never need to thank me anything like this.”

“ _I do_ ,” Kenma hisses. “Because most people _don’t-_ don’t _understand_. Kuroo tried, _tries_ , but he’s never been able to understand it, and some-”

“Kenma.”

“And sometimes I can’t give you what you want. I can’t visit you in Miyagi because trains stress me out, and I always make you come here; I can’t come to your volleyball matches anymore because that homophobic asshole from last time ruined it for me, and anxiety ends up crawling under my skin whenever I try to see your games; I can’t even hold your hand in public without breaking down! It’s not- it’s not fair to you.”

“Kenma, don’t-”

“It’s not fair,” he murmurs again, helplessly. 

“Kenma, I don’t need those things,” Shouyou stresses, rolling from underneath him so they could face each other in the soft darkness. 

“But you _want_ them, I _know_ you do.”

“Sure I do.” Shouyou shrugs, the motion just barely visible to Kenma’s eyes. “I _want_ them. But I _need_ you, so I’ll have to live without them.”

Kenma’s heart stutters. “That’s not any better.”

“And,” Shouyou says, moving his head closer to Kenma’s, “maybe one day you’ll be able to do those things for me. And if you never can, then that’s fine, too.”

Kenma opens his mouth, but Shouyou presses his lips to his briefly, just long enough to shut him up. “But you do other things for me. You always text me after my matches to see how they went; you bought me new kneepads for my birthday, knowing I needed them because I mentioned it _once_ , offhandedly; you don’t mind when I get loud and excited, even though I know people like that overwhelm you more times than not.”

“You don’t-”

“I _know_.” Shouyou smiles. “But the most important thing of all is that you love me, and I love you, so I think I can live without holding your hand in public if that’s the only condition.”

For a few moments, Kenma stays silent. 

“Not the only condition.”

“Oh?” Hinata grins, his teeth bright in the darkness. “What’re the other ones?”

“We have to cuddle,” Kenma bargains, pulling Shouyou back into him so he can hold himself against his boyfriend’s chest. “For the rest of the night.”

Shouyou thinks for a moment. “I think I can live with that,” he agrees and wraps himself further around Kenma. 

Lavender Town continues to play in the background, but both of them are too content to move and turn it off. The music loops endlessly throughout the night, and Kenma falls into a peaceful sleep to the sound of his own anxiety and the thrum of his boyfriend’s heart under his ear. 

**Author's Note:**

> Pokemon is very important me. Kenma's coping method of shiny hunting to calm his nerves may or may not be a tactic of my own
> 
> also, i may or may not be in the middle of an SR hunt for snivy in Pokemon Black and it's such a pain oh my. But it's relaxing so I'm sticking with it!
> 
> As always, please leave a kudos or comment, they really do boost moral! And, you can always come chat to me on my [tumblr!](http://for-shou-yo.tumblr.com/) I love to hear from you guys!
> 
> Anyhow, I hope to see you tomorrow for tomorrow's Hinata Week fic!


End file.
